Top Election Denier Bankrolled Trump's Venezuela Intel
Former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne spent years funding a hunt for evidence and witnesses against the Maduro regime
A stream of alternative intelligence on Venezuela, that Pres. Donald Trump’s team has been getting for almost a year now, was bankrolled by leading election deniers Patrick Byrne, according to the investigators he funded and Byrne himself.
Byrne and the two lead investigators claim that Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s regime is waging a hybrid war against the U.S. The three-tiered Venezuelan campaign ostensibly involves massive drug trafficking into the U.S., deploying thousands of gang members here led by hundreds of trained paramilitary operatives, and the serial theft of elections around the world, including Trump’s 2020 loss.
According to Byrne, the former CEO of Overstock, one of the investigators he’s backing briefed Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard just before Gabbard echoed their claims about Venezuela at an April cabinet meeting. Byrne suggested that Gabbard’s remarks were rooted in their intelligence.
Trump, too, has echoed elements of their story, which the U.S. intelligence community has sharply questioned as uncorroborated or in some respects contradicted by U.S. intelligence.
This week, Trump ordered an aircraft-carrier strike group to the Caribbean. Earlier this month, his Justice Department indicted the Smartmatic voting-machine company, a central figure in the narrative of Byrne and his team.
Since September, the U.S. military has blown up at least ten boats, illegally killing 43 people in the name of fighting drugs from Venezuela and elsewhere.
Byrne and his partners were briefly on the radar of Trump’s team in the weeks after Trump lost the election. Reportedly, Byrne’s two investigators got seed money from lawyer Sidney Powell as she sought evidence of a rigged election.
Byrne is a colorful, outspoken figure, no stranger to conspiracy theories, who often speaks in a manic, disjointed fashion. He stepped down from Overstock disclosing a three-year relationship with Russian operative Maria Butina and blaming it on the FBI.
For years, Byrne has been a high-profile election denier. He was scheduled until the last minute to speak at the Jan. 6, 2021, rally. Until recently, though, he kept quiet about bankrolling the two men who’ve led their joint investigation.
One of the two, former CIA Senior Operations Officer and Chief of Station Gary Berntsen, outed himself to the Miami Herald in March. Trump had been pushing the narrative about Maduro and Tren de Aragua gang members, and the New York Times had just reported that Trump’s own intelligence community didn’t buy it.
Nevertheless, according to the Miami Herald, Trump had removed hundreds of Venezuelans based on information from Berntsen’s team.
To push back against the Times report, Berntsen dropped the cloak and told the Herald that he and a team had been feeding Trump’s team information about Tren de Aragua since before the 2025 inauguration.
(Trump’s intelligence claims have come under renewed scrutiny since he began killing people at sea. At least one of the two survivors reportedly will face no charges back home in Ecuador and some family members have said victims were fishermen.)
As I wrote following the Herald’s story, Berntsen was a former Tea Party political candidate who’d run on an anti-immigrant platform.
But the claims from Byrne and his team go far beyond a covert immigrant army. They’ve spent years collecting evidence and witnesses attesting to the allegation that Venezuela, Maduro, is responsible for the original sin against Trump.
It was Venezuela, they say, that stole the 2020 presidential election, just as some of Trump’s team claimed in 2020. But the illegitimate Venezuelan regime — a $2+ trillion transnational criminal cartel, according to Berntsen, the biggest in history — has also, the narrative goes, rigged elections in 71 more countries.
The third member of this once-clandestine triumvirate is Martin Rodil, a Venezuelan expatriate. Rodil outed himself over the summer, in interviews with right-wing outlets. In a report last month, I fleshed out his and Berntsen’s pasts, as well as their more recent activities.
The Three Musketeers
Veteran national-security reporter Seth Hettena in his own reporting confirmed that this team was briefing the administration. Hettena told me that
“[P]eople who believe that the 2020 election was stolen — these are people like; Martin Rodil is one of them, Gary Bernsen; Patrick Byrne, the former Overstock CEO, and there are others, and they’ve been doing this for some time now — they’ve been supplying intelligence to the FBI and DHS [Department of Homeland Security], and, I think, to the DNI, the Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard.”
Many of their previous claims have foundered. A mostly friendly 2016 Bloomberg profile called Rodil’s story of Iranian missile bases in Venezuela “groundless.”
Berntsen was tied to a proposal to use disinformation to foment revolution in Kuwait.
The three are now all speaking publicly about their work, on right-wing podcasts and outlets focused on election denial, including the case of Colorado elections clerk Tina Peters. Byrne supported her legal defense.
They’ve been described as “The Three Musketeers” and “The Three Amigos.”
They have advanced three separate claims, two of which have been publicly embraced by Trump or his team. The third claim — that Venezuela has bought off officials throughout the U.S. government — is being pursued quietly by the Justice Department, they say. Gabbard has hinted as much. Here’s Byrne just last week:
“Venezuela’s committed a grievous act of war against us — Cuba, Venezuela — it was a three-part, three-layer war:
“Espionage: Well, they have about two dozen — nearly two dozen — agents in our, traitors in our federal government they’ve been paying.
“Secondly, the whole election machinery system and everything that occurred through that dimension.
“And third, the insertion of 20,0001 Venezuelan-trained terrorists along with tens of thousands of others through, you know, that was all part of the plan.”
A new, self-published book by Ralph Pezzullo tells the story of how the three met. (Pezzullo was Berntsen’s co-author on the best-selling book “Jawbreaker,” about Berntsen’s brief Afghanistan stint pursuing Osama bin Laden.)
Pezzullo’s book, “Stolen Elections,” offers shifting timelines about when Rodil and Berntsen began working together. The earliest, Pezzullo writes, is about 14 years ago, when they started an asset recovery business. That would be 2011.
Pezzullo also writes that, as of November 2020, the two had been doing asset recovery for six years. That would be 2014.
The third start date Pezzullo gives is 2018. That’s when Rodil’s former colleague at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), Roger Noriega, told Berntsen to reach out to Rodil. “The two men have been working together since,” Pezzullo writes.
So the partnership began no later than 2018, apparently. And it started, possibly, thanks to Noriega, whose hard-line foreign policy led some to mistrust Rodil, Bloomberg reported.
Then came Trump’s election loss. “Several weeks after the November 2020 election,” Pezzullo writes (although this timeframe also seems questionable)2, Berntsen and Rodil “decided to look into the Venezuelan connection to Smartmatic and possible election irregularities.”3
“Sidney’s and Rudy’s People”
Recruiting witnesses and traveling the globe was costly and the two men sought patrons. Neocon writer Michael Ledeen — who had a role in false Iraq intelligence — had been at AEI while Rodil was, and, according to Pezzullo, Berntsen and Rodil approached Ledeen’s wife for help.
Barbara Ledeen, a longtime Senate staffer with her own controversial history4, connected the duo with former Trump National Security Advisor General Michael Flynn. Flynn brought Byrne to their meeting.
Flynn and Byrne were wowed by Berntsen and Rodil, whom Pezzullo refers to as whistleblowers.
“At the end of the whistleblowers’ three-hour presentation, Byrne and Flynn were convinced that Gary and Martin had correctly identified how the theft of the 2020 presidential election had occurred and by whom. Patrick Byrne then offered to do what no one else had been willing to do: Finance the whistleblowers’ efforts to recruit additional sources who had previously played a role in the criminal conspiracy and build a computer lab where the recruited engineers could produce evidence that could be used in a court of law.”
What Berntsen and Rodil offered Byrne was an overarching theory that explained every election that the right wing considered suspicious, including Biden’s.
Byrne says he met Rodil around Nov. 25, 2020. Byrne had already been in the election-denial camp, working with a group in Texas.
In a Nov. 24, 2020, interview, Byrne spoke about his work with the Texas group, but suggested there was more. Byrne said he was “funding further and deeper investigations.”
The information they were coming up with, Byrne said, “We’re first feeding it to, you know, those who want it, which are basically Sidney’s and Rudy’s people.”
That would be Powell, Flynn’s lawyer, and Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s lawyer. Byrne says he got in touch with them the day after the election.
Byrne had gotten involved with the Texas cyber team in August, even funding them. But by the time of his late November interview, it appears that Powell’s and Giuliani’s people included Berntsen and Rodil.
Here’s how that connection happened. Berntsen and Rodil wanted someone on the inside to hear their story. Well known thanks to “Jawbreaker,” Berntsen had appeared on Fox News multiple times, so he reached out to Fox’s Jeanine Pirro, who then connected Berntsen with Eric Trump.
The president’s son wouldn’t meet with Rodil — a green-card holder — to avoid echoes of past meetings with foreign nationals. So Berntsen alone sat down with both Eric and Lara Trump, and described that meeting to Pezzullo:
“They listened and were very polite. At the end, they thanked me and Martin for our efforts. Then they put me in touch with lawyer Sidney Powell and former prosecutor and Mayor of New York Rudy Giuliani who were looking into rumors of election fraud for the Trump campaign.”
They certainly were. And Pezzullo writes that Powell gave them $50,000 — it’s not clear5 whose — “to help them get started.”
By early 2022, Byrne told ProPublica he had spent $12 million on the issue of election integrity. The following year he said he had “blown about 90% of my fortune.” This past August, he told Alex Jones it had reached $80 million. (Rodil also claims6 to know Elon Musk, but there’s no indication Musk has subsidized their efforts.)
Berntsen takes credit for some of Powell’s and Giuliani’s most notorious claims. “This,” Pezzullo said last month, referring to what Berntsen’s and Rodil’s claims, “is what Sidney Powell was talking about when she said ‘Release the Kraken.’”
But Powell and Giuliani jumped the gun. Berntsen and Rodil didn’t have the evidence yet.
But they did have Byrne, who had already bankrolled election-denial efforts, including $800,000 just in hotel bills for a “command bunker” for him, Flynn, Powell, and others. Byrne’s earliest claims have long since been debunked. But he persisted.
On Dec. 18, 2020, Flynn, Powell, and Byrne finagled an impromptu meeting with Trump in the White House.
“Will Be Wild!”
At some point, Trump Senior Advisor Eric Herschmann joined in. He would eventually describe the meeting to members of the January 6 committee.
Byrne, Powell, and Flynn were pitching Trump on Venezuela. According to Herschmann,
“[S]he [Powell] had affidavits that reflected foreign government interference. And, you know, Venezuela, [late President] Hugo Chavez, and who knows what other stuff she was saying…
“And I was asking, like, are you claiming the Democrats were working with Hugo Chavez, Venezuela, and whomever else? And at one point, General Flynn took out a diagram that supposedly showed IP addresses all over the world, and who was communicating with whom via the machines…
“[D]ifferent things … had been floating around as to who was involved. I remember Hugo Chavez and Venezuela, and she [Powell] has an affidavit from somebody that says they wrote a software in, and something with the Philippines. Just all over the radar.”
According to Herschmann, “the Overstock guy, Patrick Byrne7, seemed to support it.” Herschmann said, “I don’t know how he would ever know, although he claimed to have done so.”
Herschmann recalled Byrne, dressed in a hoodie, approaching Trump at his desk, “leaning in and saying, we’re both executives, sir, we’ve both been CEOs. We understand this.”
Herschmann interjected, mocking Byrne’s scandal-ridden tenure as Overstock’s CEO, culminating in the disclosure of his relationship with Butina.
But Trump was sympathetic, chiding his skeptical advisors and lawyers. According to Byrne, Trump said said of Byrne’s group, “‘[T]hese people at least want to fight for me.’ He turned to me [Byrne] at one point and said: ‘Do you see what I’ve been putting up with for four years?’”
Byrne said they left shortly after midnight. At 1:42am, Trump Tweeted in reference to a separate report that his loss was “statistically impossible.” He told his supporters there would be a protest at the Capitol on Jan. 6: “Be there, will be wild!”
Byrne also urged Trump supporters to be there. On Christmas Eve, 2020, less than a week after the White House meeting, Byrne said in an interview, “Congress is meeting on 1:00 p.m. on the 6th. We have to have been here for a couple days already, and we don’t raise hell. We’re not the violent guys, we’re — we’re better than the other guys.”
At the time Herschmann spoke with the Jan. 6. committee, April 2022, and still today, there’s no record that the January 6 investigators knew about Berntsen and Rodil working with Byrne, Flynn, and Powell to feed information to Trump.
But even in that December 2020 White House meeting, Herschmann says, Byrne had some basic intel wrong.
“I had it out with Flynn, definitely had it out with Patrick Byrne…
“I just said to him, do you even know who the F I am? He goes, yeah, you’re Pat Cipollone. I was like, wrong, idiot.”
Despite mistaking Herschmann for Cipollone, the White House counsel, Byrne’s confidence in his intel-gathering and assessment remained undimmed.
At some point, Byrne began funding the adventures of Berntsen and Rodil, especially overseas, and not always legally. Byrne even joined them.
“I Have Committed All Kinds of Major International Felonies”
It’s not clear when they began working together. And it may have been a gradual process.
Byrne this month called Berntsen a “partner” over the past three years. At a post-inauguration party in January 2025, Byrne said half of his work over the previous four years had been “quite an international espionage story with somebody standing in the back who doesn’t like attention.” That was Rodil, also attending the party.
Rodil’s face, Byrne says, “should be on the side of a mountain some day, who’s been the key to us understanding everything over Venezuela origin8.”
All told, Byrne says, the team made 172 trips overseas hunting clues and witnesses. At the 2025 post-inauguration party, Byrne said a government official told him Rodil had brought U.S. law enforcement a total of 120 Venezuelans — flipping, testifying, and in some cases doing time — during his decade-plus as a “fixer.” They were sources, witnesses, defendants, or in some cases all of the above.
And Byrne’s public rhetoric over the past few years lines up with what Berntsen and Rodil are now saying publicly.
As I previously reported, Berntsen claims he gave Fox News everything they needed to prove Venezuela rigged the vote, and implied that Fox settled the Dominion lawsuit with money provided by the cartel. In 2023, Byrne had said, without explanation, “Why did Fox pay? Fox is dirty.”
Byrne has pushed other specifics at the core of Berntsen’s and Rodil’s narrative. During his August Alex Jones interview, Byrne’s allegations included:
“The [Venezuela] government is the cartel.”
“Seventy-two countries have … manipulated elections.”
“The top floor of the CIA is in cahoots with China.”
Like Berntsen, Byrne even names an alleged Venezuelan asset who was a managing director at the Berkeley Research Group, which was hired by the Trump team to find voter fraud in 2020 but didn’t.
“We even know the name of the [Venezuelan] CIA asset,” Byrne says. “His name is Frank Holder.”
Berntsen told Pezzullo for his book, “Frank Holder is the biggest traitor to our country in the modern era.” (Holder’s firm did not respond to my inquiry.)
Byrne took pains not to out his teammates until they did so themselves.
“I’ve always sort of talked around him and kept him in the background,” Byrne said about Rodil on Patriot Party News in July. “I think of us as having had a Three Musketeers team.”
Byrne this summer told Alex Jones, “I spent the last three years overseas finding people involved in this.” The “this” in question was election theft in 72 countries.
“[W]e’ve been staying really low but operating internationally,” Byrne said at the post-inauguration party.
At one point, Flynn joined Byrne in Europe. Byrne told Jones he had gathered half a dozen potential witnesses — “in a safe house” — who could attest to Venezuela’s schemes.
“I had General Flynn came over to meet them,” Byrne said. And they told Flynn, “Sir, we’ve been manipulating elections for 20 years in 72 nations.”
Byrne returned to the U.S. as Trump returned to power. But he had also begun to attract heat in Europe, he says.
Soon after his return, at the post-inaugural party, Byrne said that the prime minister of an unnamed country sent an aide to tell him that he and his team were committing “four or five major international felonies.”
(In a 2023 live video, after an indictment implicated Smartmatic officials, Byrne said, “I have committed all kinds of major international felonies to get to the bottom of Smartmatic.”9)
The day after the post-inauguration party, Rodil is said to have discussed a recent meeting with Trump’s team. During a May appearance by Rodil on Patriot Party News, the host described seeing Rodil on Jan. 22.
In that meeting, the host said, Rodil “briefed us on things that he was briefing folks in and around President Trump’s team about what had been going on in the election system.”
According to Rodil, “The president understands absolutely clearly what’s going on and what happened. … He’s been supported by great people like Tulsi Gabbard.”
Over the summer, Byrne joined Rodil for a Patriot Party News interview. In it, he offers a behind-the-scenes account apparently giving the back story to remarks Gabbard made at the April 10 cabinet meeting.
Gabbard didn’t cite the Byrne team while addressing Trump, but she alluded to two of their narratives, election rigging and the alleged infiltration of U.S. intelligence:
“Rooting out weaponization, politicization of the intelligence community is a huge priority. You [Trump] know more than anyone else the very dangerous and negative consequences of that. I’ve got a long list of things that we’re investigating. We have the best of the best going after this, election integrity being one of them. We have evidence of how these electronic voting systems have been vulnerable to hackers for a very long time and vulnerable to exploitation, to manipulate the results of the votes being cast.”
According to Byrne, Gabbard was serving up what Rodil handed her — or her team — beforehand:
“That day that you saw her [Gabbard] speak at the cabinet, for the two days before that, there had been — think of us, I mean, they’ve done terrific work — but Martin, taking a silver platter, getting all dressed up and for two days pouring champagne off his special silver platter for a bunch of people. And it was, after they had consumed that bottle of champagne — of Martin’s best champagne — for two days, and all the evidence and everything we had, that’s what you saw Tulsi Gabbard talking at the cabinet meeting and say, ‘We now know this is all for real.’ It was the day after they had just finished taking, taking the first load of stuff from Martin.”
Byrne doesn’t definitively identify the April 10 cabinet meeting as the one he’s referring to, but just a few days prior, on April 7, Berntsen appeared on Pezzullo’s podcast and shared some details that would make the timing gibe:
“I’m actually right now in Washington, DC, and I’m meeting with elements of the government and we’re doing additional briefings for the government right now. We’re sharing the things that we have found with them so that they can pursue them.”
Byrne claims his own contacts within the government. In his 2023 video about the Smartmatic-related indictment, he said, “I am in the background of a lot of this stuff going on and have been.”
Former Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Nadler10, who started the case but left the Department of Justice (DOJ) in 2020, has since represented Byrne and at least one of his partners, according to Byrne himself and Pezzullo’s book.
Even three years into the Biden administration, Byrne said, he still had allies in the inner circle of then-Attorney General Merrick Garland. Addressing Garland directly, Byrne said,
“By the way, Merrick Garland, there are people in your circle, who you trust the most, who’ve been sending me information… [Y]ou’re trusting a ring of about ten people around you and multiple elements in that ring who’ve been sending me information, who got information to me…
“Your own rank and file at the DOJ isn’t following your orders, you dumb fuck.”
After Trump’s election, Byrne’s partners say, the team was welcomed by the new administration. In the April podcast, Berntsen said:
“They’ve accepted us with open arms and they’re like, give us everything you’ve got, now. Y’know, what else have you got? What do you think? And they’ve been very kind and they’ve been very thoughtful and helpful. This has all been shared with the administration.”
There are signs, however, of some open arms becoming less open recently. And of Berntsen wearing out his welcome.
Hettena has reported on the activities of Byrne and his partners. In our live chat earlier this month, Hettena said that Berntsen “has now been told to stop giving briefings to the FBI because he would go in there and go, ‘you’re so fucking stupid.’”
Even Trump’s FBI, apparently, did not take kindly to Berntsen’s approach, and, Hettena said, “They’re just like, get this guy out of here.”
In fact, it’s not even clear whether Berntsen is still a Musketeer. “I’ve been told,” Hettena said, “that he is on the outs with the main group.”
Hettena’s assessment is born out by Byrne’s recent social-media posts. Last month, Byrne Tweeted “it’s not that Gary has suddenly forgotten his partner these last three years, it’s that he’s forgotten me but somehow remembers to steal all my best lines!”
Four days later, however, Berntsen spoke highly of Byrne. On a podcast supporting Peters, Berntsen said, “Patrick Byrne was a real hero. He stepped in. He helped finance us. He became the third leg of the stool as we were doing this for the next couple of years.”
On Oct. 6, Berntsen again praised Byrne. “One very brave person that stepped up was Patrick Byrne stepped up to finance us,” Berntsen said on a right-wing podcast about Latin America.
If Berntsen was offering olive branches, Byrne doesn’t seem amenable. Last week, Byrne Tweeted about Berntsen that “We don’t really like each other and he would rather eat mud than say my name.”
Byrne’s ties to Rodil, however, appear to be intact. In the same Tweet, Byrne adds that he and Berntsen “have been the two junior partners to a magnificent Venezuelan spy who will go down in American history.”
It’s one of Byrne’s predictions that looks increasingly likely to come true.
I’m an independent journalist whose reporting is made possible by reader support. As a former executive producer at MSNBC, I helped create Up w/ Chris Hayes and previously was a senior producer on Countdown w/ Keith Olbermann. Your paid subscription will help me keep digging.
Rodil has spoken of first looking into elections as early as 2012. Pezzullo’s book says that a wealthy Venezuelan businessman alleged stolen elections and that Rodil sought help from an unnamed Israeli company that “discovered” rigged machines.
In one interview, Rodil says, “we as a team began working on elections back in 2012,” although it’s not clear who he’s referring to.
She investigated former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s emails.
The 2021 tax return for Byrne’s America Project lists a $50,000 grant for “election integrity” but does not name the individual recipient.
Earlier this month, Rodil said about Musk, “I remember leaving his house and he told me, ‘The computer in my Tesla, if I have the right access, can manipulate the U.S. election.’”
The transcript misspells Byrne’s last name as “Burn,” which I’ve corrected.
The audio clarity for the word “origin” is less than definitive.
Byrne claims that the bribery charges are really about election theft. Smartmatic itself was indicted earlier this month in connection with the bribery scandal.
This article originally misidentified Nadler as a former U.S. attorney. It has been revised to reflect his correct former title, assistant U.S. attorney.
Old school reporting. Detailed — and evidence backed . Excellent. Miss this kind of true journalism reporting instead of modern talking head opiniating.
Is there anyone on the right that ISN'T a walking scandal? Maybe Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, but the rest of these guys, the "MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE" need to find their own country to try to mold into their perverse fantasies of power and oligarchy. It's sick how high they are on their own supply.